


Every Inner Inertia

by bluepeony



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, M/M, Post-Movie, Rating May Change, Slow Burn, warnings for typical richie & eddie foul language
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-25
Updated: 2019-11-04
Packaged: 2020-10-28 07:57:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,812
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20775182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluepeony/pseuds/bluepeony
Summary: Eddie isn't dead. And he sure as hell isn't going back to New York.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I accidentally saw Chapter 2 twice and now I can't stop thinking about these two losers. I wanted to write something brief and romantic like everyone else is doing but then I sat down to do it and what I got instead was this, which isn't romantic but which if people like it I could maybe write more and it could become romantic. But who am I kidding, if I write any more of these two it's undoubtedly going to be a university au because that's where my heart truly lies.
> 
> also I read It but like years ago and all I remember is that Richie likes horror movies.

Eddie doesn’t like the idea of sleeping in a room with Freddy Krueger on one wall and Pinhead and the Cenobites on the other, but between this and Richie’s uninviting modular sofa in the living room, there isn't much choice.

“I don’t know if I could justifiably call it a guest room,” says Richie, leaning against the door frame, “‘Cause if we’re being honest, it’s just my teenage wet dream that _happens_ to have a sofa bed in it.”

He glances around the room, as if it’s only now he’s realising how inappropriate a sanctuary it is to offer to guests. There’s a pinball machine, but no dresser. A La-Z-Boy, but no spare towels laid out.

“I did wonder if it was more polite to let you sleep in my room. I mean because it has an actual bed in it. Your mom ever make you do that? My mom always made me give my friends my bed, and I got the, you know, pissy mattress on the floor.”

“I remember,” says Eddie.

Richie squints, arms folded against his chest. “You do?”

Eddie heaves his suitcase into the middle of the room, lets it flop to the floor. “I keep remembering random shit intermittently. I was in the shower yesterday, and out of nowhere I had a crystal clear vision of Bill shoving my mother’s massage wand up against his nose and calling himself Gonzo. _That’s_ the shit I remember. Nothing useful.”

Richie shrugs, says, in what seems to be a genuine attempt at being sensitive, “I’d rather remember your mom’s vibrator than that fucking clown -”

“It was a goddamned massager and she used it to alleviate symptoms of dermatomyositis. It was prescribed, for Christ’s sake. Richie, are you gonna fold out this bed or what?”

“Of course!” But Richie pauses, for too long.

“You have, like, no idea how it folds out, do you?”

“Honestly? No.”

Eddie sighs, crouches by the sofa, starts looking for a lever.

It’s not like he hasn’t had time to think about this. A day in hospital, getting his face stitched up. The whole six fucking hour flight from Maine, JFK swapped for LAX; Myra’s hysterical calls blocked, guiltily, on his phone. The two hour drive back from the airport in Richie’s car (bright red Chevy Camaro, _so_ fucking predictable, so fucking Richie), Wild Cherry and Talking Heads so loud on the stereo Eddie could barely hear himself _think_ but he could tell this was the right thing to do, for now, while it still hurt to smile for the hole in his face, and he still needed to be with someone he knew he could say anything to and not run the risk of being called insane.

It’s just that it’s late, and he aches, and he really wishes Richie knew how to set up this fucking sofa bed, only so that he can slam down on to it and sleep for a month.

**

In some ways, Richie’s apartment is everything Eddie might have expected, if he'd ever stopped to imagine it before. Uncharacteristically stylish, because Richie no doubt lazily purchased it furnished, and crammed with total _shit_, because Richie is a hoarder. His fridge is sparse; very much the fridge of a single forty-year-old. He pulls out a beer and offers it to Eddie, and when Eddie shakes his head Richie immediately reaches back in and pulls out a different kind of beer and offers that instead, as though the brand were the problem.

“Do you have any, uh…” Eddie knows it’s stupid before he even says it. “Don’t fucking laugh. Tea?”

Richie blinks. “I think you know I don’t, Eds.”

“I’ve really been into chamomile tea recently. Natural sedative, you know. Reduces stress. Stress is a killer.”

“Clowns are fucking killers. Where was your tea then? Have a beer.” Richie grabs a bottle. “Come on, it’s Chinese.”

So they sit in Richie’s kitchen and drink Tsingtao beer, and it hits Eddie that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s _doing_ here, on the West Coast where he’s never even _been_ for fear of crypto, sharks and skin cancer. He’s just sitting here, gazing out at Richie’s living room with its endless rows of stupid DVDs, and its dumb, ostentatious fish tank, and its pictures of Richie with –

“Shit, is that Jay Leno? You met Jay Leno?”

“I meet lots of famous people, and then my agent frames pictures of me standing with them and brings them round with the mail. It’s one of the many by-products of being a C-list celebrity.”

“Come on, Rich,” Eddie mutters, sipping from his bottle, “You’re like, at least creeping into B-list territory. People shit-talk you on Twitter.”

“You’ve noticed that, huh?”

“Kind of hard to miss when your childhood friend’s trending for telling jokes about incestuous necrophilia.”

Richie shrugs. “Everyone’s a critic.” He goes to sip his beer, pauses, and adds, “My act’s fucking stupid. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m gonna write a fucking book. What? Isn’t that what semi-famous people do when they have a breakdown?”

“You’re having a breakdown?”

“Aren’t you?”

Eddie thinks about this. He takes a long, long drink from his bottle, before conceding, “I guess so. I haven’t slept in a week and every time I close my eyes I just see horrible shit. Add to that the anxiety over my no-doubt impending divorce, the potent memories of a near-death experience in a sewer, and the fact I’m sleeping in Richie Tozier’s spare room – yeah, I guess you could say I’m breaking down.”

He looks at Richie then, doesn’t miss the slight flicker of hurt in Richie’s dark eyes at being a part of the gloomy line-up.

“That last part was a joke, obviously. I’m happy to be here. I _want_ to be here. In fact, I think it’s the only place I could stand to be right now, even if your apartment is an homage to _The Evil Dead_.”

“If I’d known you were coming –”

“Richie, it’s fine –”

“ – I’d have, you know, taken down the creepy shit, put some fruit in a bowl, cleared my internet history.” Richie lifts a hand, flops it back down again, uselessly. “You’ll come to realise most of my toiletries are stolen from hotels also.”

“I really, honestly don’t give a shit.” Eddie’s hurt Richie’s feelings, he knows he has, and he worries himself with trying to take it back. “Thank you for sitting through a six hour flight with my aviophobic ass and putting me up in your apartment. I'm sorry if I drive you insane while I'm here.”

Richie's face relaxes; thankfully, he goes back to smiling. “Eds,” he says, voice warm, “I've put up with you since 1976. I think I can handle one more sleepover.”

**

They don't go to bed until the dead hours of the morning, and though Eddie hasn't slept properly in days, when his head hits the soft pillow (Richie surprised even himself by managing to source well-laundered bed linen) his mind races, stubbornly refusing to switch off. Pinhead smirking down at him isn't the problem, nor even the ache on the side of his face which always seems to flare up whenever he tries to settle. It's more the fact he can hear Richie shuffling about in the room over. Eddie's hearing becomes so sensitive in the dark he can hear the mattress springs in Richie's room depressing as he gets into bed, the small clatter on the night stand as he takes off his glasses. The shuffling of sheets, sounds of someone trying to get comfortable. Then silence.

Eddie rolls over on the sofa bed. Stares at a Defender arcade machine. Weighs his options. Technically, he could get up, pad barefoot to Richie's room like a child, and tell him he can't sleep alone.

Realistically, he'll lie here until morning, and imagine what would happen if he were to get up, pad barefoot to Richie's room, and tell him he can't sleep alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for v slight coercion into drinking alcohol

For a few days, they shuffle round each other in Richie’s flat, sweat-panted and groggy, living almost exclusively off grilled cheese, Chinese takeout, and beer purchased in twelve-packs from a little convenience store a block over, which also seems to be the exclusive source of Richie’s groceries.

They sleep. They watch movies. Richie mostly chooses, steering clear of horror, clearly trying to pick what he thinks Eddie might like. _A Few Good Men_. _Midnight Cowboy_. _Dog Day Afternoon_. They spend one long day watching back-to-back episodes of _Ancient Aliens_, eating from bowls of dry cereal. And then Richie has to go back to work.

“It’s just boring shit,” he says evasively, when Eddie asks. “I’ve gotta go to a couple meetings. Sort some things out. It’s wild.”

Eddie takes this to mean Richie’s cancelling more shows. Partly from the stress of nearly dying; partly from concern over the after-effects of launching a pickaxe into Henry Bowers’ back.

“You’ll be okay on your own, right?”

Eddie nods without thinking, and when Richie leaves, and the slam of the front door echoes through the big apartment, Eddie finds his legs drawing up against himself of their own accord, his arms wrapping around them, his forehead going to his knees.

He curls into the corner of the sofa and listens to Richie’s neighbours through the ceiling. The apartment is so quiet that their footsteps seem to boom above him. Richie doesn’t have any ticking clocks or noisy kitchen appliances. The windows are triple glazed against the traffic below. If Eddie strains to listen he can just about hear the whirr of the fish tank filter, but without the clatter of Richie’s clumsiness or his endless streams of commentary, Eddie starts to feel dense, and sort of sad, and a little sick.

At some point he gets up and busies himself with cleaning, somewhat maniacally, so that when Richie comes home later he pauses in the doorway, looks back over his shoulder as if he’s walked into the wrong apartment, then comes in and dumps a bag of groceries on the kitchen counter.

“I knew this would happen,” he says.

“What?” says Eddie.

“I knew as soon as I turned my back you’d start fucking cleaning. And I know for a fact there’s nothing in the kitchen _to_ clean because I never cook.”

“I’m sorry my coping mechanisms bother you so much, and also, you’re welcome.” Eddie slaps down the towel he’s been drying dishes with and folds his arms, a little defensively. “I just got bored, I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Oh come on, there’s like, the whole of _Star Trek: Next Generation_ in there,” says Richie, waving his arm in the direction of the living room. “Next time you feel bored, can you at least _try_ to do it in a normal way?”

He turns towards the front room, stops, sighs, turns back around.

“I’m sorry. I’m a dickhead. Thank you for cleaning up.”

“Bad day?”

“Yes! Stupendously! Can we go out?” Richie rustles around in the shopping bag on the counter and slams down a box of chamomile tea. “I bought you this shit but honestly now I’m thinking about it I don’t think it’s gonna cut it. I don’t need a sedative, I need a stimulant.”

Eddie looks from the tea to Richie and back again.

“Do you wanna just sit down and tell me what happened?”

“No, Eddie. I wanna get _really_ drunk. You in?”

**

It’s a relief to be out of the apartment, even if Eddie complains about not wanting to be seen with stitches still zig-zagged into his face. The fresh night air is like a hit from his inhaler, and for the first time in what must be a really _long_ time, Eddie feels a flicker of something which could be enthusiasm.

Until he sees the bar Richie picks, and then he just wants to fuck off back to the apartment.

“Come on, Richie, this is practically a student bar.”

“No, it’s not.”

“It has Vampire Weekend flyers in the window. I don’t even know what the fuck that means.”

“So what?”

“So we look fucking creepy going in here. You’re on TV and you live in L.A., surely you know somewhere a _little_ more exclusive, no?”

“You overestimate my star power, Eds. Besides, I don’t wanna spend the night talking to people in my field who are more successful than me. I wanna go in _this_ bar – which, by the way, I have been coming to for _fifteen_ years – and I want tequila slammers and PBR. Okay?” He pushes the door open with one hand, but holds back for a moment to look at Eddie over his shoulder, expression softening slightly. “I promise if any sorority girls start giggling behind their hands, we’ll leave. Okay?”

“Fine, fine,” Eddie mutters, although when they do go inside it’s not as bad as he’d initially feared. Deeper in the smoky shadows of the place people don’t look so young, and Eddie can envision Richie wiling away the odd spare evening here, playing the slot machine for the hell of it, cracking wise with the bohemian bartender. There’s a stage, empty for the moment but plastered with flyers. Richie always liked music. Back in high school he used to beg them all to get on the bus to Bangor to go see some underground band. They were nearly always terrible, but as a kid Richie was attracted to anything noisy and chaotic, and he had a penchant for making his friends feel like anything noisy and chaotic was the same thing as fun.

Eddie isn't sure this place could be classed as fun, but it's certainly cooler than any bar he's been in before, or likely ever will be in again.

Richie orders two beers and four shots, splits them evenly across the bar. His own shots are gone in seconds. Eddie’s sit untouched.

“Is now a good time to tell you I don’t drink?” he deadpans.

“Fuck you.”

“Not this shit anyway.” Eddie pushes the shots towards Richie, and pulls the beer towards himself.

“_Yes_, this shit,” Richie insists, sliding the shots back again. He bats Eddie’s arm with the back of his hand. “Come on, this could be our last chance at having fun together before you ditch me for New York. Don’t be tragic.”

Eddie doesn’t respond to that, though he knows, of course, that Richie is right. He has to go home eventually.

“I get serious hangover anxiety,” he admits. “Hangxiety, if you will.”

This is true, and yet, as with most things Richie asks him to do, Eddie finds himself somehow complying. He picks up the first shot, downs it; grabs the other – sighs – downs that one too.

“Happy now?”

“Absolutely ecstatic.”

They find a table in a corner, and sit face to face, beer bottles and knees almost touching.

“So when _do _you want me to ditch you for New York anyway?” Eddie asks, without really wanting to know the answer.

Richie shrugs. “Well, you’re already bored here. I’ll be honest, I’m kind of expecting an _auf wiedersehen_ any minute.”

Eddie closes his eyes for a moment, looking for the words. “I didn’t mean that, before. When I said I was bored? I didn’t mean _bored_, I meant…” He pauses. “When you left I started going out of my mind a little. Like I couldn’t be on my own. I don't know, it was fucking weird.”

“I felt the same way,” Richie says instantly, as though reassured. “The whole journey from my apartment to the studio I felt like I wanted to throw up. Even in the meeting. And the grocery store. It didn’t stop until I got home.” He considers this for a moment, as though he’s only just now had chance to acknowledge it, and what it might mean. “It drove me insane today, walking around, trying to pretend like everything was normal. Everyone was focusing on these minute details, and I just wanted to scream that none of it matters because I went back to my hometown last week and nearly got KO’d by a sewer clown.”

“I don’t even know what the fuck _I’m_ gonna do about work. Or Myra. Or anything. Look.” Eddie pulls his phone out of his pocket, shows its blank screen to Richie. “I’ve just switched it off like a pussy. They’re gonna think I’m _dead_.”

“Yeah, you maybe should tell them you’re not dead. I know you came out of Derry with a new-found resolve to live life on your own terms and all that jazz, but your wife probably still wants to know where you are.”

Eddie cringes slightly. “I’ve told her where I am. And I’ve told her I can’t talk to her right now.” He sighs, and for a moment drops his head into his hands. “Can I just stay here forever, Richie? We can be roommates. I won’t take up a lot of space, I’m pretty sure I could just fit into a cupboard or something.”

Richie shrugs. “You got it, Harry Potter.” He swigs from his beer bottle, then takes out his own phone and switches it off completely. He puts it flat on the table, next to Eddie's. “Okay, here’s the plan. We’ll get completely shit-faced tonight, have a great fucking time, not text or Tweet _anything_, and tomorrow, when we’ve Burger King’d away your hangover, we’ll turn our phones back on and help each other sort out our respective, messed-up lives. Deal?”

He holds up his bottle. Eddie looks from it, to Richie’s smiling face, before clinking his own bottle to Richie’s.

“Deal,” he agrees. “But if we’re gonna have fun, you’re gonna need to take me somewhere a lot more interesting than this.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No warnings so far as i can think, just more references to drinking (some underage) and richie using a slur (towards himself)

_“What is it? It smells like Christmas cake. It’s gross.”_

_“It’s Courvoisier, you uncultured swine. My mom gets shit-faced off this stuff.”_

_“Then maybe you shouldn’t have stolen it off her, seeing as the whole idea was to _not_ get caught, moron.”_

_“Uh, thanks for the tip, Edward, but I didn’t steal it off my mom, I stole it out of her Purim carnival food basket – so if you don’t mind, I stole from _charity_, fuckface.”_

_“God, Richie_._” That’s Stan, sitting cross-legged on the opposite side of Richie’s bedroom._

_“What? Needs must when the devil drives, Stanley. Isn’t that what religion’s all about?”_

_“It’s really not.”_

_“Can I try it, Richie?” Bev reaches across the floor, chipped blue fingernails outstretched, and Richie gladly hands the bottle over._

_“Sure, Bev. I knew you were a woman of good taste.”_

_Beverly always manages to set a precedent. Once she’s taken a healthy swig from the fat golden bottle, everyone else in the circle does the same, until finally it’s back in Eddie’s lap. He takes the hem of his t-shirt and carefully cleans the mouth of the bottle, then lifts it to his lips, eyes closed tight, and drinks. Richie darts out a hand and tips the bottle at the bottom, so that a great slosh of it hits the back of Eddie’s throat all at once. He chokes and splutters._

_“Ugh!” he spits, and shudders. “Get fucked, Richie. I think I’m gonna be sick. I think I’m gonna get strep throat. It’s burning!”_

_Richie rolls his eyes, yanking the bottle away from him. “Party’s over,” he announces, taking another swig. “Eddie’s gonna die.”_

“What happened?” asks Richie, nudging Eddie’s foot with his own. “Party over?”

“Uh,” says Eddie, and for a moment it’s all he can manage. “I guess I just needed some air.”

Richie sits down on the curb beside him. “We can go home.”

“I don’t want to,” Eddie says immediately. “I don’t think. Maybe I do.”

It isn’t like they haven’t been having a good time. In fact, it’s been so much of a good time that even Eddie was surprised when, out of nowhere, in the third or fourth bar, a sudden and catastrophic gloom overcame him, so overpowering that he’d had to make a quick excuse and dart for the exit while Richie was still mid-conversation with the barman, the doorman, and a shit-faced babbling couple from Florida.

“I think I realised like, fifteen minutes ago that this was probably a bad idea,” Richie admits. “What with alcohol being –”

“– a well-known depressant?”

“– and us having been through –”

“– extreme levels of stress and trauma?”

“Exactly. So we’re fucking stupid, but… I mean, I had fun. And it was cool seeing you have fun. You know. For a change.”

Eddie shakes his head, exasperated. “We’ve been back in each other’s lives like, two weeks, what do you know about me having fun?”

“I know you haven’t had it in twenty-seven years for fear you might combust. And only very rarely managed to have it prior to that.”

“Fuck you, really,” says Eddie, but he smiles a bit.

Richie goes quiet for a moment. He’s fiddling with something in his pocket that Eddie can’t see.

“Are you okay?” Richie asks after a moment, voice uncharacteristically gentle.

“Yeah,” says Eddie. “I mean, no, generally speaking, absolutely not okay. But right now, in this moment, sitting on this dirty fucking curb with you… yeah. I’m okay.”

It’s after midnight but still a little warm out. It’s different to how it gets warm in New York in the summer. LA is still dirty as fuck, sullen and smoggy, but somehow Eddie finds it a little easier to breathe in its air, like it isn’t quite so noisy and full, and bubbling up, like it doesn’t expect so much of him. His melancholy begins to shift some now that he and Richie are just alone again; his chest feels lighter, and he heaves a sigh, and feels – almost feels – peaceful.

“What the fuck has happened, Richie?” and he puts his head on his arms and laughs.

“Nothing. We’re just two buddies, out for a drink in the city. We’re the most ordinary people in the world.”

**

On their walk home, Eddie tells Richie about his marriage.

He’s never been able to talk about it with pride. Never been able to hold his chin in the air and say “my _wife_” in any fond, or admiring, or smug sort of way. It’s always felt faintly embarrassing, in fact, like he might have been saying “my geriatric nurse” or “my housemother”.

And of course, over time, the shame he felt over not loving her enough only mingled with the shame of people knowing they were married, and so eventually it grew to a point where talking about her, or to her, or even around her, only ever seemed to give him discomfort.

“It’s fucked,” he admits. “I’m fucked.”

“You’re not fucked because you married someone who wasn’t right for you. I mean, that’s like saying Tom Cruise is fucked, and Kim Kardashian is fucked, and Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe were fucked –”

“Pretty sure all those people were – in some way, shape or form – fucked –”

“And _Henry VIII _was fu –”

“I just can’t believe it’s taken nearly dying to realise I’ve got to get a divorce. It’s just one thing after another, I swear.” He stops, mid-step, and closes his eyes. “God,” he says, “I’m _drunk_.”

He comes to the mortifying realisation he’s been offloading, and he suddenly wishes he could scoop it all up and shove it back inside of himself. He’s never liked letting his guard down in front of anyone, least of all Richie fucking Tozier. Richie, who is simultaneously so uncool and yet _so_ stupid cool that only he could make mid-life bachelorhood seem happening; almost impressive. Like Eddie’s the square for having a normal life.

It’s one o'clock on a Wednesday morning. Wednesday mornings don’t ask for this kind of shit.

“Would you ever…” Eddie says, as they start walking again, slower now. He’s become keen to divert the subject away from himself, in an effort not to accidentally chuck up any more horrifying tidbits from his life. “I mean, Rich, did you ever... sorry, that’s a stupid question.”

“Why is it stupid? Wait, what was the question?”

“I was gonna ask if you’d ever come close to getting married, but then I thought, no, I know exactly what you’d say if I asked that. You’d say… you’d say, uh, _what the fuck kind of masochist would give half his life’s earnings away just to fuck one person over and over till he dies?_”

There's a pause, while Richie considers this.

“I’m sorry, was that supposed to be me?” Then his tone changes, like he’s snapping out of a take on a movie set, and he says, somehow both with resignation and a little sharpness, “Eddie, you know why I’m not married. I know it, you fucking know it, don’t try to wheedle something out of me because I’m six slippery fuckin’ nipples down and barely able to walk in a straight line.”

Eddie blinks in shock. “It was just a question, asshole. God forbid I take an interest in your personal life.”

“Well, there’s nothing interesting to be interested in, so let’s leave it. I am desperately, perhaps irrevocably, single, and maybe life would have been easier if I’d married my mom when I was twenty-five, but I didn’t, so.”

They walk on in a silence which has grown thick.

“Fuck you,” Eddie says quietly.

Richie shrugs. “You’re right. Sorry.” He pauses, like he’s thinking about whether to say it; when he does he slurs it a little, like the words don’t want to form. “Guess I’m just a touchy fag.”

Eddie doesn’t say anything after that. They go back to Richie’s apartment in silence, bar the scuffs of their shoes against the concrete, and with the space this opens up for him to think about it Eddie realises he’s made a fundamental mistake in believing he could talk to Richie about something which, historically, they’ve both been so catastrophically bad at.

**

“Night cap?” Richie suggests when they get in.

Eddie shakes his head. “No, thanks. The hangxiety’s setting in.”

“Little late for that, don’t you think?”

Richie goes to the kitchen, though rather than reach for any more liquor (and in the days since Eddie’s been here, he’s discovered there’s a_ lot_ stashed behind the unassuming gloss cupboards) he grabs a clean glass and fills it with cold water from the tap.

He flicks the kitchen light off again and hands the glass to Eddie. The way he holds the glass by the bottom, so Eddie can take it from the top, seems slightly deliberate.

“I’m sorry,” he says suddenly, voice a little rough now with drowsiness, “for being a dickhead to you, like, all the time.”

Silence buzzes between them for a moment, in the apartment which is always too quiet when no one can speak to fill it. Eddie tries to look him in the eye, but Richie won't meet his gaze, either out of exhaustion or diffidence, it isn't clear.

“Rich?”

Richie shrugs, shoving his hands back in his pockets. “It’s just something you do to me. Night, Eds.”

And hasn't this always been their thing, to say something to the other and drop it just as quickly, duck out like a motherfucker. As Richie goes past and out to the hallway Eddie watches him; mutely, woozy, leaning against the wall. Wondering what the fuck he’s supposed to do with that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are we still doing fix-it fics? I don't know, but it's annoying me that this still isn't finished.
> 
> Thanks for all the lovely feedback on this and sorry it's taken so long to update.
> 
> Also now taking prompts on my [Tumblr](https://bluepeon-y.tumblr.com/)

When they were kids, Richie used to guzzle horror movies like fucking pop.

His older sister used to work at the local movie theatre; he’d slip her his allowance, and she’d sneak him into everything their parents forbade him from watching: _ A Nightmare on Elm Street_, _ Arachnophobia_, _ Child’s Play_, _ Tremors_. He even liked the crappy sequels, the more ludicrous the better. He convinced his sister to get him into _ Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers _ three times.

“_One _ friend, Richie,” she used to say, which meant he wasn’t allowed to lug along _ all _ of the Losers.

It wasn’t difficult to choose. Beverly always wanted to go the most, vying with Mike for top spot. Bill was only interested in the ones that weren’t gory, while Ben and Stan could barely cope with _ Gremlins_, let alone _ The Silence of the Lambs_.

And Eddie – Eddie usually said he didn’t want to see the dumbass movies. He tended to file them away as a _ Richie Thing_, like Street Fighter, and Nintendo Cereal System, and cherry Squeezeits, and Vanilla Ice. Bad for you, and faintly ridiculous.

But once, when they were fifteen or sixteen, Richie convinced him to go see a film called _ Dead Alive_. It was so disgusting, and so downright fucked, that rather than balk at it Eddie had miraculously found himself _ laughing_, tears streaming with it sometimes, at the blood and the guts, and the demented stop motion, and sometimes when Richie laughed or groaned he’d grab Eddie’s arm in the seat next to him, and at one point Eddie jumped so hard he upturned his Slush Puppie all over both of them, which just set them off all over again.

They came out after the movie, jeans sticky with blue sugar, still nudging one another to do their best New Zealand accents (“Gee, I bet you go off like a _ rocket_!” “Probl’y suck the blood’a virgins, eh!”)

Even now Eddie can remember the sugary electric feeling of being able to make Richie laugh. Of their bare arms – skinny, downy – brushing clumsily, before Richie pulled on his parka against the winter night to go home.

_ Frankenhooker_. _ Chopper Chicks in Zombietown_. _ Slumber Party Massacre III_. These were the kinds of straight-to-video B-movies they’d eat up in Richie’s bedroom, after his sister tragically ceased employment at the movie theatre, and they – the two of them, no Bev, no Mike – had to get their horror fix from somewhere else. Huddled under Richie’s sheets, slurping potato chip salt from their fingers.

It was always cold in Richie’s house, his parents were tight with the heating; Richie would give Eddie extra pairs of socks, and Eddie would tuck the bottoms of his pyjama pants into them before they got into bed. This ritual was theirs, their roles finally solidified after so many years of knowing one another. Eddie liked the over-indulgence that came with the sleepovers, and the way the others weren’t a part of it.

They seemed to share the same weird logic that nothing in the movies they watched could ever be worse than what had happened to them when they were thirteen. It was like peeking through a viewfinder; facing the monsters without having to deal with the reality of them. Sometimes Richie watched with such an intensity, as if just to prove that he could. In turn, Eddie would watch him, out of the corner of his eye. Fall asleep that way, on occasion, his head on Richie’s pillow, and sometimes he’d wake up and Richie would be on the mattress on the floor, and sometimes Eddie would wake up with his nose pressed against Richie’s back, and for reasons Eddie couldn’t fathom then, and can’t now, neither of them ever said a goddamned thing about it.

**

Eddie drifts on the edge of sleep for a couple of hours. Shifts into consciousness around four, again at five. Lies there, straining to hear something, anything. His mouth is horribly dry. He finishes the water Richie gave him but it doesn’t do much, so he creeps to the kitchen to refill it. Goes back to bed for a short while and, when it gets too maddening to lie there any longer, he gets up again and crosses the wide hall separating the guest room from Richie’s.

He pauses outside Richie’s door for a long moment. Then retreats. Then returns, and knocks on the door before he can talk himself out of it.

Nothing happens for a while. Eddie has already turned on his heel when the door finally opens, and Richie stands there, squinting without his glasses.

“What?” he whispers, when Eddie doesn’t say anything.

“Are you awake?” Eddie whispers back stupidly.

Richie looks at him. “No,” he deadpans.

“I’m sorry. I just, I can’t fucking sleep, dude. Your apartment is deathly quiet. It’s freaking me out.”

“What else?” Richie says, voice a little rough with sleep. “The sheets are too soft? The temperature’s too ideal?”

“I had no idea you could be so grumpy when you woke up.”

Richie lifts a hand uselessly, flops it back down again. “Surprise!”

“Look, it’s almost morning,” says Eddie. “Can’t we just… hang out a little? I’m so awake it’s killing me.”

Richie looks at him for a moment. Then his eyes, slightly unfocused, drift down, and back up again.

“Why do you wear full pyjamas, Ed? It’s _ extremely _ weird.” He steps back to open the door wider. “Come on then, if you’re coming in.”

Which isn’t exactly what Eddie had meant when he’d asked to hang out, but it becomes clear Richie has no intention of leaving his bed again until he sees fit to do so, which in hindsight is perhaps fair enough. Richie rolls across the mattress, which is huge – absurdly so – then rummages around beneath his pillow and tosses a remote to the opposite side of the bed.

“Pick what you want, just make sure it’s conducive to sleep.”

Eddie grabs the remote, and glances at the screen opposite the bed. A behemoth of a thing; 75 inches and slightly curved.

“Your TV is disgusting.”

“Thanks,” says Richie, face in his pillow. “I’d make a joke about how great the porn is, but I’m half a-fucking-sleep.”

Eddie puts the TV on mute, and flicks through channel after channel after channel (they’re endless; Richie has _ sports _ packages, for Christ’s sake) before settling on some old vintage cartoon marathon. Richie ignores it for a little while, but after the first couple of Tom and Jerry shorts he rolls onto his back and cracks an eye open, sighs and stretches. With a slight air of resignation he pokes Eddie to turn the sound on.

They don’t talk about the conversation they were having only hours before. Feigned nonchalance has always been their style; it seems to work for them. Or rather, it doesn’t work, but at least it isn’t completely unbearable.

“I barely slept either,” Richie says after a while, through a yawn. He runs a hand through his hair, so it sticks up in all directions. “Finally fell asleep at, what, four? Had some fucked up dream.”

“What happened?”

Richie pulls a face. “You don’t wanna hear it. There’s nothing more boring than people talking about their dreams. It was just weird shit.” He watches the TV for a little while longer, before deciding his glasses might actually help him see it better. “Fucking used to love that little duck, man,” he murmurs, as Tom tries to cook Quacker in a stew on screen.

Eddie nods, then says, suddenly, without really stopping to think about it, “I think I should go home.”

“What, like, now?”

“No. No, obviously not now. In a few hours, or tomorrow, or something…”

“Or something?”

“I don’t know. It’s stupid. Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologise. If you wanna go, go.”

There’s a slight edge to Richie’s voice; hurt, perhaps. He grabs the remote from Eddie’s side of the bed and flicks the channel on to something else. Then flicks it back again. Up on the screen, Tom chases Jerry with a red mallet.

“It is because of… me?” Richie asks, uncharacteristically doubtful.

“Yeah, man. It is. I can’t stand you.”

Richie looks at Eddie when he says this, and Eddie looks back at him, all the way across the stupid big bed. Richie laughs, a half-hearted laugh, just a breath through his nose.

“Fuck off, then.”

“If you want the truth, I’ve just had an attack of conscience and realised that the right thing to do – the _ moral _ thing to do – would be to go home and apologise to my wife for disappearing for over a week without sending so much as a postcard.”

“You’ve just realised that, in this very moment?”

“Yes. Right this minute. Just as Little Quacker levelled a revolver at Tom, I thought of it.”

“Fitting, that that would be what made you think of your wife.”

“Good one.”

“In all seriousness, sending a postcard to her would have been a little fucked up, no? _ Hey babe, weather’s great, clown’s gone full Freddy Krueger on my ass, wish you were here!_”

Eddie smiles at him. He can’t help it. He doesn’t feel like smiling. It hurts to smile. It’s weird; he looks at Richie, and it aches a little to do it. Like he misses him before he’s even left. Like his body is letting him know what it’ll feel like once he goes home.

The distance between them suddenly seems unreasonably far. This occurs to Eddie as abruptly as Quacker pulling the gun.

"You know I don't wanna go home, right?" he says quietly. "It's just that I have to."

"You don't have to do anything you don't want to," Richie says, only he's not looking at Eddie, he's determinedly looking anywhere _but_ at Eddie. "I feel like you haven't heard that enough. Fuck having to do _ any_thing. We can do what we want. You wanna catch a plane to… fuck, Rio? Let's catch a plane to Rio."

This time, when Eddie smiles, it hurts a again, only it's in his chest. "We can't though, can we?"

"We _ can_."

"I know we can. But we can't."

Richie looks at him now. Pushes his tongue against his teeth, the way he always does when he’s trying to stop himself from saying whatever it is he really wants to say.

“It’s fucking stupid,” he decides on, finally. “We’re two grown fucking men who can’t even do what they want to do. I realise there’s a slight irony in me saying that, lying here at whatever-the-fuck-o-clock in the morning watching this shit. But I mean…” He looks at the TV, then at his hands, then at Eddie. “Why are we constantly having to do shit we never asked to do, Eds?”

He sounds sort of angry now. Eddie knows that for Richie, anger has always been safer than hurt.

“I never asked for any of this,” he says firmly. “My life was fine.”

And Eddie doesn’t know if Richie means his life before Pennywise the first time around, or the second. And Eddie doesn’t know what to say, either, because him coming here was never supposed to be something that upset Richie.

Not knowing quite what to do, he reaches a hand out, across the mattress, and just sort of holds it there, unsure what he means by it but knowing that Richie is looking at his hand like Eddie has just offered him something completely inappropriate. Until Richie reaches out too, not to hold Eddie’s hand, but to touch his fingertips to Eddie’s, just. His eyes flicker to meet Eddie’s curiously.

He looks a little nervous, but like he isn’t sure why.

“Okay?” says Eddie.

“I guess so?” Richie mumbles back. He pulls his fingers away quickly. Scrabbles for the remote, turns the TV off. “I think I wanna go to sleep now. I can feel my eyes burning. We’ll talk in the morning.”

“It _ is _ the morning.”

Eddie feels he’s been cut off in the middle of something important. He wants to protest, but Richie is pulling the sheets back over himself, conversation clearly over.

“The real morning,” he clarifies, voice muffled by the cotton. “Too fucking tired for this.”

There’s only one lamp on in the room and it’s on Eddie’s side of the bed. He taps it off to be obliging, but he isn’t tired, not really, and he lies awake, rigid and confused, even though it feels like Richie’s mattress probably cost more than Eddie’s entire fucking car. Something dull and unpleasant thuds beneath Eddie’s ribs.

Sometimes they’d lie like this as kids in Richie’s bedroom, and Eddie would stare up at the electric blue Street Fighter poster at the end of the bed and dream up all the deep and profound things he wanted to say to Richie, only by the time he’d figured out how to articulate them Richie’s breathing would have deepened and evened out beside him. Eddie only seems to know the right thing to say when Richie isn’t there for him to say it anymore.

If someone were to ask him what the right thing to say would be now, in this moment, if Richie wasn’t back on the brink of sleep, Eddie would probably say something like: _ I know I don’t want to leave you, and I don’t know why that is, but as soon as it’s real morning, I have to go home. That's what I'm supposed to do._


End file.
